Saturday, February 13, 2010

Valentine's Day

Back in the Middle Ages, or at least for most of it or in most countries, February 14 was nothing. There is some suggestion that Valentine's Day may have been an invention of Chaucer's in the 14th century. Since we are not living in the Middle Ages, I can post something about love and lovers and I choose a famous paragraph from Heloise's letter to Abelard,
"God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend [amica], or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore......you kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains. God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore."
This letter was written some time after 1132 C.E. in France. Heloise is amazingly modern in her attitude to love.
I used the Penguin Classic "The Letters of Abelard and Heloise" , Betty Radice trans. I highly recommend it as it has everything you want to know about these two. It includes a history of their romance, other writings, a couple of letters between Peter the Venerable and Heloise, a brief history of France at the time that they were living, current scholarship on the letters, etc..

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

She was amazingly modern and clearly in love...I do not like the Valentine's day at all but thanks for posting that fragment!

Bridget

Kristin said...

Wow. She really loved him, didn't she?

The Red Witch said...

She goes on to say that at times when she should have been praying, she would dream about the times they made love. She didn't regret daydreaming about sex during services and that she did not hold God or his son before Abelard. Course then he got worried because he feared that she would not get to heaven with those thoughts and he would lose her for eternity. It makes me very sad for them both.

Brooke from The Bluestocking Guide said...

Wow. I don't even know how to respond to this.

Jeanne said...

OMG - that's one of the most romantic things I've ever read! Just beautiful.

*loves*

Tracy said...

Like Bridget I'm not a big fan of Valentine's Day, but yes, Heloise was clearly in love/obsessed with Abelard.

but sweeter for me will always be the word friend [amica]
And she is right about that - friendships tend to last much longer than love (that obsessive kind of devotion only lasts two years, usually, anyway)

The Red Witch said...

I don't know if I would call it obsession, she was stuck in a convent with little else to think about and then she came upon a letter he had written about their troubles and all the things that she had kept inside of her for 10 years came spilling out.
Perhaps my next blog entry should be a brief history of Abelard and Heloise.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps my next blog entry should be a brief history of Abelard and Heloise.
That would be good :)

Tracy said...

Sorry, that last comment was mine!

The Red Witch said...

I guessed that. It shall be done.